The Elephant Vanishes

It seems with Murakami one either loves him or is completely meh.
I am glad to love him so much!
It's a puzzle to me, as I'm not fond of a lot of his subjects, but there is an affinity that goes deep.

I can't fathom the connection...but I guess reason is where you find it. p122

Maybe its that feeling I get from him that life is bearable after all.

A life without that feeling might go on forever, but it will have no meaning at all. p100

I want to be able to be in two places at once.That is my one and only wish...

Some authors excel at writing novels. Others excel at the short form. A few are equally adept at writing novels and short stories. From my reading of The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami is not one of those people. Here’s why:

Murakami’s novels are lush affairs. By that I mean that his proto-typically lazy character has time. Time to develop interests, time to contemplate deeply, time to be affected, to become . . . something. The short form, by its very nature, does not allow the same luxuries. So when Murakami’s prototypical ambivalent protagonist shows in a short story (which they often do, in this collection), the results are unspectacular. What one might consider “breathing space” in a Murakami novel, a place where the reader can coast through the reading before returning to the more meaty, idea-heavy sections, becomes a void in his short work. Unfortunately, once in the void, there are two options: float silently away into space or explode as the vacuum’s pressure differential kicks in. More often than not, these types of stories simply fade away into an unsatisfying whisper. I can appreciate the difficulty in transitioning from one form to another. I started off as a short story writer, then pushed my way through novellas, then novels. It’s not an easy task to switch from one mode to another, and I’ve failed myself, many times. My notebooks are full of half-finished longer work and ideas that never really coalesced into full-formed novels. Murakami seems to have the opposite problem, soaring in his novels while stuttering in his short stories.

Thankfully, there are exceptions.

The collection starts off well enough with “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women,” an ethereal tale about a loveless marriage and a strange encounter in the lot of an abandoned house. This literary dream is the sort of thing Murakami is famous for, and rightfully so. This is a story that wraps itself around your head and doesn't let go.

“The Second Bakery Attack,” incidentally, the second story in this volume, is a downright wacky escape from responsibility, one of those adventurous, spur-of-the-moment, nearly psychotic events that you've always wanted to orchestrate, but never had the guts to carry out. It's a rampage, of sorts, but a darkly funny rampage.

The story “Sleep,” about a woman who loses the ability to sleep and seems to be none the worse for wear because of it, could have been brilliant. But the ending was terrible. It was just too abrupt and jarring, like the evil twin of deus-ex-machina descending out of an unseen trapdoor in the ceiling to drop on the reader with an unwarranted assault of the intellect. Reading this ending, I felt insulted. So much wasted potential!

“Barn Burning” had the tone of The Great Gatsby, but nowhere near the same depth of substance. A good story, but not great.

My favorite story of the collection was “A Window”. This one blew my socks off. It is one of the shortest works in the volume, and the most powerful. The main character is a young man who is hired to read and edit letters sent to him by women who want to become better writers. There's little to excite in the plot itself, but the emotion is deep and often poignant. Absolutely the most moving story in the book. This is one that should be anthologized for the sake of the next generation of readers.

“The Dancing Dwarf” came in a close second. It is a modern fairy tale, replete with spiritual possession, diabolical contracts, and the dire consequences of living up to such a contract. This one pushes beyond magic realism into the realm of fabulism. Its mood is different than any other story in this collection, truly horrific, and I wonder if Murakami couldn't fit this into a collection of darker work. I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

The title story is a very interesting tale, ostensibly about a vanishing elephant, though I suspect that the impetus for the story came from questions about quantum mechanics, probability, and scientific observation. But those philosophical underpinnings lie beneath many folds of pachyderm skin. As the elephant vanishes, the implications grow. A fitting ending to a short-story collection, no?

While the stories I've mentioned are strong and would have made an excellent collection on their own, the others detract from the “oomph” I like in short story collections. I'm a bit disappointed, to be honest, but the stronger stories hold the overall product up at an acceptable level. Don't bust the bank to purchase a copy, but do seek it out at your local used book store or library. It's worth that much, as well as a few hours of your time (if you're a slow reader like me). Recommended, with reservations.

Ho sempre sostenuto di preferire un Murakami da romanzo, piuttosto che da racconti, forma, quest'ultima, in cui credevo non riuscisse ad esprimere il meglio del meglio. Come una seta ricercata intessuta a metà: perfetta ma incompleta, o completa ma rovinata. Con questa raccolta il mio mantra comincia a vacillare, colpa di quelle perle preziose che sono riuscita a scovare qui dentro, e che mi hanno fatto brillare l'anima e gli occhi.
Se come lettura è poi da considerarsi promossa ed acclamata, come condivisa dichiaro di essere arrivata al magna cum laude; forse non mi era mai capitato di schiudermi così tanto per affrontare un confronto tanto stimolante, imbevuto della migliore introspezione. Grazie, Carmine.

Di seguito, i racconti che ho preferito:
un 5 stelle pieno per Vedendo una ragazza perfetta al 100% in una bella mattina di aprile (un chiaro esempio del fatto che si possa scrivere un capolavoro in meno di dieci pagine. Mi ha ricordato la bellissima leggenda giapponese del filo rosso...), Il secondo assalto a una panetteria (rapine, amore, fucili, panini e maledizioni), Affare di famiglia (questo entra tra i preferiti di sempre incondizionatamente. Se il protagonista esistesse, vorrei davvero conoscerlo), Sonno (giù il cappello per il Maestro. Di una lucidità tanto razionale quanto illogica, da brividi) e infine Silenzio (grazie, Murakami).
Molto degni di attenzione anche Una lenta nave per la Cina (molto malinconico, mi ha lasciata in uno stato che definirei di indeterminazione), Granai incendiati (profondo ma inafferrabile), Il nano ballerino (surreale, divertente ed estemporaneo), L'ultimo prato del pomeriggio (Norwegian Wood, Tokyo blues docet), ed anche L'elefante scomparso (ovvero: come affrontare l'estraneazione in un mondo troppo nuovo per giocattoli vecchi e dimenticati).
Gli altri racconti li ho trovati più o meno piacevoli, con una valutazione complessivamente sufficiente, tranne forse per un paio di essi che non ho trovato appieno soddisfacenti.

4 stelle e qualcosa in più

نهرب من الجنون بالجنون.




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I've been deeply disappointed in Murakami before, and I seem to remember that they're always short stories that I have found useless. But this collection floats my boat. I agree with some reviews I've read that complain of the lack of variety in the protagonists' situations -- they're, almost to a one, loners, bored, alienated, and around 30. Most of them are experiencing some kind of freakish alteration in the world around them which, I take, we are meant to interpret as changes in themselves. This kind of theme and this kind of protagonist simply doesn't lose its fascination for me, however, so I can keep plowing through these stories with aplomb.

If you have trouble sleeping, like I do, just don't read "Sleep" before going to bed. A premonition led me to read that one during the day, and I'm glad I did.

Haruki Murakami is a best-selling Japanese writer. His works include 1Q84, The Wind-up bird Chronicle, etc. which have garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards. To date, I have been eyeing to read some of his latest works including this novel, The Elephant Vanishes. And now that I've finished this, I can't totally picture how I'm feeling right now, it's like I finally found my missing Tom cat for four(4) years while leaning over the edge of a boat and look down to the bottom of the sea watching as the water's calm surface reflected in the blue sky with thirty (30) orders of McDonald's Big Mac inside my mouth and a whole bunch of wind-up story of four(4) Kangaroos, a random Sandman carrying a 100% Perfect Girl who is not that pretty and a little green monster observing the yard as an enormous elephant began to disappear in thin air exactly rolling inside my head, satisfying. And that, my friends, came out of nowhere, but those weird and random things originally puked from The Elephant Vanishes. Ha ha ha. Puked, sorry, I just. Ha ha ha. Oookaaay, enough of that.

This is the very first time I met a book that is hilariously written (that explains my mess up feelings above). The Elephant Vanishes is a compilation of stories that seems to be unreliably weird and unexplainable but once you think about it, the stories are about the simple and boring things or events people experience on a daily life basis, for example, the story of the Kangaroo Communiqué, if you look at it normally, it's about a bored employee who received a complaint from an ungrateful customer. As you can see, most of our life experiences really get in our nerves; Murakami tries to remove those stress and pushes us to leap into an exciting experience and separate those unreliable realities into a different one.

"True, luck may rule over parts of a person's life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there's a WILL-- much less a strong will to swim thirty laps or run twenty kilometers -- there's a way to overcome most any trouble with whatever stepladders you have around." --The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami

Mis favoritos:

Sobre el encuentro con una chica cien por cien perfecta en una soleada mañana del mes de abril
A este puro relato le regalaría cinco estrellas, un jumbito y le cargaría la BIP a Murakami si viajara en transantiago.

Un barco lento a China
No se si me hubiese gustado tanto si no me sientiera cercana a la cultura china. Quizá no, pero como la realidad es otra, le doy 4 estrellas.

El enanito bailarín
Terror, humor y realismo "Murakamiano" at its best. 3,8 estrellas solo por su final no me llenó.


El resto de los relatos son, a mi gusto, bastante flojos. Con todo lo que me gusta Murakami, siempre engancho menos con sus libros de cuentos.